US Politics, February 2018: Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots

"Their"

another classic trump typo, should have been "collusion is sex"

I know I'm wrong about this, but something about the memo debacle feels like so much air has been let out of the buffoon. He buys into the bs drumbeat behind the Nunes memo, everyone agrees the memo is totally devoid of anything (even if it is still somehow full of shit), and yet he seems to be the only one incapable of recognizing there is nothing there, let alone that it doesn't even mention his name. Probably because he never read it. It makes it just that much harder to take any of his accusations seriously, which is saying something for a guy already one step up from an aged Hollywood monkey trained to flap his lips to pretend he's talking.

It also only mentions rosensteins name once in passing. Pretext to fire anyone, this is not.

something about the _____ debacle feels like so much air has been let out of the buffoon

dummy Republicans keep pushing the line somehow the dossier was used to get fisa warrant to spy on Trump campaign. But memo says absolutely nothing about that. Investigation of trump campaign, via Papadopoulos, began before the dossier and the memo just talks about fisa warrants for Carter page, which is not the same thing at the Trump campaign.

also heard the maddening argument that just as Trump is in trouble for seeking help from a foreign power, Russia, Clinton did the wrong thing by seeking information from her own foreign power, Christopher Steele, who is British. As if there is no difference between England, a longtime ally, and Russia, a longtime adversary.

The point they tend to make is that Steele was getting information from Russian sources.

Trump vindicated himself. marvelous. it's like he has his stooges doing their most mediocre to obscure the real reason for their devious scheming, and then he tweets out the real reason for the memo verbatim.

love that Russian sources on Russian crimes are somehow bad. It's almost as bad as learning bad things about Trump and then deciding you don't like him.

Not to go too far down the rabbit hole but the Trump-fan talking point is that the Russian government probably knew about Steele and planted false information in the dossier to discredit both sides. The dossier, in combination with the ongoing rumours of assistance from Ukraine, is why it’s probably important that Trump is nailed for offering a quid pro quo for info - or requested more than just intel - otherwise the door is open for Fox, etc to keen harping on the ‘both sides do it’ stuff.

lol uh-oh Nunes:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/03/politics/memo-dossier-christopher-steele-carter-page/index.html

xpost I'm interested in your perspective: if the dossier is hypothetically faked or untrustworthy, then why is Trump pushing so hard against it? Why is he so resistant to the investigation if he has nothing to hide? Wouldn't an investigation reveal it to be fake? he could just say it is BS and then say any investigation will prove his point. But the harder he pushes back, the more prolonged the investigation gets, and the worse and worse it looks.

xpost I mean they had to expect someone would have leaked some of the contents of the rebuttal memo once the release of the minority memo was rebuffed.

Nunes is really good at bed-crapping.

Nunes already admitted he didn't look at the fisa requests. because what could possibly be gleaned by facts that you can't get from shady inference?

yeah his bitch-boy Gowdy did.

xpost I'm interested in your perspective: if the dossier is hypothetically faked or untrustworthy, then why is Trump pushing so hard against it? Why is he so resistant to the investigation if he has nothing to hide? Wouldn't an investigation reveal it to be fake? he could just say it is BS and then say any investigation will prove his point. But the harder he pushes back, the more prolonged the investigation gets, and the worse and worse it looks.

Could be a bunch of reasons:

a) he knows the investigation will turn up unconnected financial crimes
b) he was actively working with the Russian government but not how the dossier says
c) he genuinely believes he hasn’t done anything wrong

He wants to argue (falsely, it appears) that the whole investigation is tainted by having been triggered by the Democrats pushing Steele’s dossier to the FBI - so anything coming out of it is illegitimate. Marcy Wheeler (who is a big proponent of the collusion theory) argues the dossier, and Democrat’s involvement in spreading it, unhelpfully muddies the water.

It’s important to remember that the collusion / organised crime narrative doesn’t hinge on a single thing in the dossier being true - and that’s almost certainly for the best given how sloppy and implausible it looks in places.

why is Trump pushing so hard against it?

Aside from the strong possibility that he is obstructing the investigation because he is guilty of crimes he thinks will be uncovered, his entire history suggests that Trump is incapable of not hitting back when he feels attacked, so that even if he were pure and innocent, he'd be acting this way. Which is stupid and reactionary, but we already knew that.

boy I'd love to find the "Trump won't be any worse than Hillary" shitbags right now and meet them behind an alleyway

Aimless otm

The 2 things most nuts about this may be that 1) even if Hillary wrote a personal check to Steele for this information , it would have no bearing at all—zero—on its permissibility as evidence. Prosecutors routinely leverage biased interests to collect information, and 2) nothing (as far as we know) abt the Steele Dossier has been disproved! All we know about it's validity is that about a third of it has been substantiated.

"its" I should run for president

boy I'd love to find the "Trump won't be any worse than Hillary" shitbags right now and meet them behind an alleyway

i have one who appears occasionally on my fb to comment on stories i might share, like the one where the cnn guy says he regretted the false equivalencies they pulled during the election coverage. my friends barely engage him anymore and i think he's just raging at hillary now to negate the guilt he feels over what has happened, but he was seriously "but her emailsing" last week.

This happened w/ me over the holidays w/ someone I really respect and care about and I had to change the subject while she was still talking

I haven't reread the Steel Dossier since buzzfeed published it, but it was pretty clear that a lot of it was pretty unbelievable. It's value was mostly as a comedic distraction, and if the GOP hadn't been using this as their fig leaf for a counterattack they would have found something else. With the Nunes memo out it's pretty clear that everything with the dossier was above board, except for the still slightly debatable decision to publish it.

I haven't read the dossier since it was leaked either, but I recall the vast majority of it being perfectly in line with everything everyone was saying both before and since its release. With the exception of the pee tape, and as we talked about in this thread before, if that were revealed to be true as well it would shock literally no one at this point.

holy shit that Paul Ryan tweet boasting about a secretary making $1.50 more a week

almost seems like he's making fun of her but I think the GOP really is that out of touch

1. costco membership covered!!
2. shop for big deals
3. excess money saved b/c deals can be invested for future!!
4. personal responsibility ftw!

he's totally setting her up for success upon success

ryan deleted it lol

that a costco membership doesn't even give you anything -- just the right to buy things -- seems fitting

it's utterly baffling to me that he thought that was a good thing to put out there. Also baffling, that this teacher (if she actually exists) thinks this is a great deal for her.

must be nice for Randy Bryce, dude is writing your attack ads for you

he's got this already

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVIUGHgWsAYOTEP.jpg

and is asking for $1.50 donations to "repeal and replace" paul ryan. hell yeah.

er sorry i guess that's not directly related but he reposted it and in context it's a great comeback for the $1.50 line

The Koch Brothers got .4 billion. https://t.co/Fy47Ksr2Gh

— Randy Bryce (@IronStache) February 3, 2018

- Nunes’ memo fails to demonstrate that the government lacked enough evidence beyond a dossier from former British spy Christopher Steele to obtain a FISA warrant on Page.

- Steele’s expertise on Russia and organized crime would have outweighed any concerns a FISA court would have had about the funding of Steele’s work by partisan actors — funding sources that Steele may not have even known about.

- Nunes’ memo “provides no credible basis whatsoever” for removing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

- Nunes’ memo shows that Republicans “are now part and parcel to an organized effort to obstruct” Mueller’s probe.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/democratic-rebuttal-calls-nunes-memo-deliberately-misleading-n844426

Their was no Collusion

theirs is no collusion

yours is no disgrace

haha ymp I had the same thought

their was no collusion
cause, it's time, it's time, in time with your time, and its news
Is captured for the queen to use

Trump getting all Yessed out on a Saturday night.

I've Seen Some Good People, I Assume

lol at the trending #YoMemoJokes

wait can I take that back

I meant to say

I've Seen All Good People, On Both Sides

I was mega stressed out this weekend and while some of it was related to work/personal life/just the fact that I have massive anxiety, I realized poring over this whole fiasco has drained me to the point of wanting to punch strangers in the face.

and the funny thing is....I felt the same way a year ago. the whole country is in an abusive relationship atm.

The invaluable Marcy Wheeler makes sense of releasing the memo and the GOP's phony hysterics about civil liberties.

Every single privacy activist I know cares about privacy in significant part to ensure the rule of law and to prevent the arbitrary exercise of justice to focus just on select groups like Muslims or Chinese-Americans, rather than those who pose the greatest risk to society, like people allegedly doing Russia’s secret bidding. Yet the actions of Ryan and Nunes reverse that, using a sham concern for civil liberties as a way to prevent themselves, their associates, and the president from being subject to the rule of law like the rest of us would be.

If we’re going to have this secret surveillance ― and Nunes and Ryan insist we need it ― the key to protecting Americans is drafting the law to provide protections and ensuring those standards are met. Section 702, as Nunes and Ryan reauthorized it, fails that test, because it permits the warrantless access of completely innocent Americans’ communications. And for all its bluster, the Nunes memo doesn’t tell us critical details we need to assess whether what happened to Page was improper specifically, or simply indicative of known concerns about outside consultants that Nunes and Ryan have long ignored (and continue to ignore with all other Americans)

how long before someone pulls a Pentagon Papers and leaks the actual intel that spurred the memo or the FISA application itself?

i think if trump somehow got rid of mueller that would happen immediately

it wouldn't be prudent to leak that yet, for anyone who wants the investigation to succeed

we've been going about it all wrong, tapes about grabbing pussies won't kill Trump's popularity. release a tape where he says he loves Muslims and gays, that'll kill him with his base

No, they'd go all dilbert and assume he was brilliantly playing the long game and trolling the libs and alinskying us by forcing us to be held to our own blah blah blah...

Remember that his base assumed the feud with Bannon was orchestrated between the two of them, as a genius act of misdirection. I saw this offered in apparent earnest.

WTF are you all talking about, Trump has said many times how much he loves Muslims and the Gays, and how much they love him, and how much he employs them. It’s only the Radical Muslims and the marriage-destroying Gays that will get what’s coming to them, and that’s due to their own choices. Obviously.

Trump loves everyone, like Jesus.

Speaking of which, does the guy even go to church? Did he even join a church? No one cares right? Only when it's Obama?

he doesn't go to church. church goes to him

Trump could be in the act of gutting one of his supporters like a fish and that supporter would give his own evisceration a thumbs-up because tribalism.